


death and the maiden

by belatrix



Category: A Song of Ice and Fire - George R. R. Martin, Game of Thrones (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Gods & Goddesses, Alternate Universe - Mythology, F/M, Kidnapping, stockholm syndrome-ish
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-01-14
Updated: 2017-01-14
Packaged: 2018-09-17 12:38:59
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9323960
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/belatrix/pseuds/belatrix
Summary: His hand closes around her wrist, brittle like a bird’s, and he pulls her forward just a little, just a little bit. He shows her the empire that spreads out around, vast and cold and dead. Beautiful, in a morbid, melancholic sort of way.A queen, his touch seems to be saying.You can be a queen.





	

The story starts like any other fairytale. It’s one of the oldest pages in the book.

Her mother dresses her in pastels and lace, and blossoms dance in her wake when she runs through the woods. It’s a pretty picture, always, but even flowers can get tiresome when they sprout from every place her feet touch. But her mother loves her and wants to see her happy, even when she puts a heavy hand on her daughter’s shoulder and tells her to be careful, to be home before dark, to never talk to strangers.

Yes, her mother loves her with a love that thrums throughout the trees and the soil, but she is loved by so many others, you see. They love her smile, soft and bright and quick to curve, pink across her lips. They love the way she smells like sunflowers and lillies, and how she never ties her hair, and how she stops to sing with the birds and holds her hands out to deer and rabbits.

 _What a pretty thing_ , they say. Even the earth herself seems to agree, branches bowing when she walks past. _She’ll make a fine goddess_.

Her dreams are filled with the glittering future waiting ahead, the possibilities unspooling before her, glittering like a gemstone in her mind’s eye. She sees herself, beautiful and lauded and beloved, sitting on a golden throne, her loving husband at her side. Thousands praying to her name, their kind protector. And what if it’s all something predestined, already set in stone? It’s common knowledge that the children of gods do not have a choice; she can be fine with that. Hers is the destiny of a daughter of a goddess, after all. How can she be unsatisfied?

So she smiles, and dances barefoot in the woods, and bends to pick up a flower with dew droplets on its petals, like pearls.

Her mother did warn her not to talk to strangers. The thing is, Sansa didn’t. He snatched her up and carried her away before she had a chance to. She never spoke a single word.

 

 

 

Catelyn’s fingers are working swift at her embroidery when she hears that Baelish has been reaching to the above-world, looking for… something. Someone. No one knows what it is he really wants, they tell her. No one ever does.

She arches an eyebrow, idle. “Is that so.”

She is surrounded by her womenfolk, nymphs and goddesses and mortals, sisters and daughters and mothers and wives, all backlit by the golden sun. One of them pours more wine, puts on music, something soft and lilting. “ _I_ heard that he’s searching for a lover.” There are murmurs, chuckles, hisses. “I cannot blame him. Living among the dead must be dreadful. And so very lonely.”

Catelyn does not raise her gaze, but her hands pick up pace. Her needles sew through fabric, a hyacinth among the greenest leaves. It has been decades since Petyr had last tried to steal a kiss from her, looked at Catelyn with those eyes filled with darkness and longing and desperation.

 _Well_.

She is a goddess, and he is not a fool.

She is not worried.

 

 

 

Everything that Sansa knows now is made from marble and smoke and stone. A kingdom built on screams and shadows, wrought from pulsing iron, colder than ice to the touch.

They say nothing grows here but gold, but she learns soon enough that this is untrue; there is ivy, sharp and threatening as barbed wire. Dark flowers twisting and curling around her ankles and her calves, stretching out, dead vampire-mouths out to drink her dry.

Screams leak from the cracks in the marble; white noise that she can’t understand and makes her want to cut her ears off with a kitchen knife.

Petyr is like that, too. He does this to her, with his eyes that she can’t make sense of and the words he whispers like he’s afraid she might break if he speaks too loud, but it’s no better than the screeches of the dead. He makes her feel small, rabbit-hearted, a doe with her leg cut off.

She’d kicked and clawed at him, she remembers. Babyish fingernails left faint marks down the side of his face for the entirety of five minutes before they faded away. For the space of a single breath, he’d looked at her like he was sorry.

Now she sits, a butterfly pinned to a dissection board. She watches him watching her.

The ceilings are impossibly high, stretching above like clouds, winding and floating and she thinks it might be the sky, after all. It isn’t. Sansa tries to remember the color of the sky as the sun rises over the hills, and comes up blank.

She can’t say that he doesn’t try, Petyr. He sits across from her at the dining table and treats her like she means something to him, like she’s free to leave any time she wishes. He asks her about her thoughts, her dreams, her anything. Inconsequential things, polite nothings to fill the silence that hangs and closes in around them like a vice.

Sansa remains still and silent and cold, hides under her skin like it’s porcelain. She turns this into an art form, cuts him down where she can.

“Sansa―”

“Yes?”

“Do you―”

“No.”

“I could―”

“No.”

Her mother had been so proud of her, she recalls, because Sansa knew how to hold conversation about a thousand small matters even before the age of thirteen. About art and music and books, too, though that came later. Ladies are supposed to learn those things, are they not? The children of gods, even more so.

None of it matters now.

He tilts his head, resigned, and she keeps staring with eyes like glass. The world around her is so cold, so cold, that perhaps the only way to stay sane is to become cold, too.

 

 

 

Catelyn’s wrath takes the earth by surprise. Her family, most of all, watch in horrified fascination as everything goes white and crystal and dead. It is easy to underestimate a woman of flowers and songs. It is easy to forget that water can turn into snow.

 

 

 

He’s made a palace just for her.

Ivory and gold and fine metalwork at the seams, velvet along the walls. It’s warmer, too. She hides away in it so that she doesn’t have to face the ghosts that float in the river, and writes letters to her mother that she will never send.

 _How are the lemon trees in my garden?_ she scribbles as an afterthought, in the margin. _They are my favorites. Please don’t forget to take care of them_.

 

 

 

She stops dreaming of him soon enough.

At first, it was nightmares of the ground splitting in two, a chariot that blazed in the red glow of the sunset. It was plunging into water colder than death, it was smoke that smelled like incense and something else, something decidedly rotten. It was screaming, a piercing thing carried through the underworld. Her heart pulled from her chest, smothered in tangled veins, pitter-patter crimson on the floor.

 _Thud thud thud thud thud_.

Someone ought to put bubble wrap around that heart.

Now her sleep is empty, a blank screen and a vast nothingness. No sound comes through the walls of her rooms, and she’s sure it’ll drive her crazy, a whimpering girl in the middle of an obscenely large bed. She used to fall asleep to the song of cicadas and the howling of wolves, the humming of water and the voices of a dozen nymphs, huddled next to each other by the fire.

Gone, gone, gone. All of it, gone.

But he gives her a crown, come morning, made from dying stars and frozen fire. He places it on her head like he’s afraid to hurt her and at the same time not at all, smiles a satisfied little smile that she thinks might reach his eyes.

“You look like a queen,” he tells her. He lets his finger brush down her cheek, contemplative and maybe just a touch hesitant.

 _Is that what I am?_ She wants to ask, and she’s sure he hears it all the same, but both stay silent after that. _Am I a queen, or a doll thrown into a mason jar?_

His hand closes around her wrist, brittle like a bird’s, and he pulls her forward just a little, just a little bit. He shows her the empire that spreads out around, vast and cold and dead. Beautiful, in a morbid, melancholic sort of way.

 _A queen_ , his touch seems to be saying. _You can be a queen_.

 

 

 

The world has stood still. The world wails, and it is not their fault, Catelyn wants to tell her people this, _it is not your fault_.

But she’ll have her daughter back. Her sweet daughter, who loves songs and birds and all the colors of spring. Her Sansa is not made for iron and blood. Her Sansa―

 

 

 

Petyr can hear her screaming, sometimes. Or could, those first few days, when she woke up at midnight with a cry lodged in her throat, chewed nails twisting in the sheets. She trembled and muttered to herself and wept at the injustice of it all. A caged little thing.

She avoids him, now. She looks at him without blinking when he walks past. Once, she opened her mouth like she wanted to say something important, but swallowed and locked herself in her room instead.

She reminded him so much of Catelyn, in that damned field in the sunset. Her hair the same shade of ember red, glowing and flowing. A lilt to her step like her mother when they played chase as children secreted away at the river-lands. That same spark of almost-mischief when she proved she could swim better than one of her nymph friends. That same spark of soft, fragile kindness when she helped a rabbit out of a snare.

But he stares, at her pretty face that reminds him of his childhood and his lost dreams and the descent into the world of corpses and gold; he stares, and suddenly, all he can see is _her_. Sansa. Sansa with her skin that seems paler and thinner with each day that passes, with the occasional sharpness in her glare, the hint of metal in her smile. Sansa, with the way her shoulders quake when she tries not to cry.

She seems so frightened, sometimes. So confused. And, hell, he would build her a hundred towers and dress her in flowers if that would make her feel safer. If it could make her stop looking at him like he’s something demented, something monstrous.

People are not good and bad, he knows. People just sometimes make decisions that have a lot of complicated results. He brought her here, and that had… complicated results. Consequences. He can’t seem to find the will to let her go, but there are days when he looks at the emptiness of her gaze and feels pins and needles, something prickling the back of his neck.

Fuck those eyes of hers. They make him make stupid decisions. They make him feel stupid.

But she wears the crown he gave her, still. He notices that about her. Maybe it means something. He knows it means something.

 

 

 

Little by little, morning by morning, she takes to exploring her new home ―no, no she will not call it that. The marble floors are not as cold, now, and the vines do not creep around her ankles, ravenous hands gone. Perhaps Petyr’s kingdom is getting used to her; it seems to warm up, just a bit, stretching and twisting and curving to accommodate her. And the dog likes her, too. And the ferryman sometimes looks at her with kindness.

She does not feel like a queen, but she decides to walk like she is one. She holds her shoulders straight and lets her dress whisper across the ground. She thinks she might be getting used to the screams, as well, which is only a vaguely alarming thought.

Sansa will not turn herself into an icicle for him, she understands this now, nor will she cower away and await death, certain he’ll plunge a dagger in her chest and spill her lifeblood. No. Sansa is a daughter of the sun, borne by love and the strength of water and wolves, kissed by flowers and sung to by nightingales. There is her heart, still beating, reminding her she’s alive. Reminding her who she is.

She spits out the darkness, and steels her spine. He is not a monster. He’s a lovelorn thing with coldness in his blood, a man of ghosts and coins. And she is her mother’s daughter, and so much more.

Did he not fashion her into a queen, after all?

 

 

 

“You stole me,” she says, and there is no true accusation in her voice. It’s not even cold, he notes, merely a statement of a fact, no more emotion behind it than a remark about the weather might hold. But that’s the thing, there is no weather down here.

(Oh, but _above_. He has heard of what his forgotten not-lover has made of the weather above. He cannot find it in him to fault her.)

He just stands, quiet and still, and the moment feels like it’s carved out of glass splinters.

“You stole me,” she repeats, an edge of something urgent in the lines of her face, now. “I won’t stay here forever.”

“No,” he says, and he can barely hear it himself. “No, I don’t suppose that can happen.”

She looks satisfied, his little not-doll. Not always porcelain. She raises her chin, a little. “Good,” she says. “ _Good_.”

 

 

 

It does come to an end, eventually ―only not. This is not final. Somehow, they both know this.

“My mother knows I’m here,” Sansa says, sitting at her window and looking out into her little garden. He had it made for her a week ago, and his gardeners said not much could grow in there. But pomegranates seemed to bloom. She’s wearing black, today, like she’s trying to show him something.

“Your mother is a smart woman,” he says flatly. It’s not untrue. He’s not terrified of Catelyn’s wrath, but she’s always been so fiercely loyal to whatever she set her mind to. She might be capable of tearing through the underworld itself alone, if it will mean getting her precious spring child back. But this is not a knot; there can be a solution. There always can.

And with dilemmas―

(He can trick her, oh, he _can_. She’s a clever thing, but she watches her garden longingly, and she hasn’t tasted fresh fruit in so long. It must have been her lifeblood, once. It hits him, how awfully empty his halls will be without her red hair floating in the smoke.)

―there come choices.

Sansa turns her head. She looks very, very calm. “I will go with her. I’ll return to my mother, Petyr.”

 _I’ll return to the sun and the seas and the grass and the birds_ , is what she does not say aloud, but he hears it all the same.

There’s something coiling in his chest, for just a second. “I expect nothing less from you, sweetling,” he says, and she lets him take her hand in his. She’s so warm. “You’ll return to your dancing and singing and sewing. You’ll be the daughter of a goddess again, the prettiest of all. I only pray you’ll think of me, sometimes. That you’ll remember what it’s like to be a goddess yourself.”

Sansa’s lips part, and she cants her head, wide-eyed. She seems to be holding her breath, bewildered, shaken.

And then she smiles, leans forward and presses a kiss, soft and fleeting, to his cheek. “You are a wicked man,” she murmurs, and he cannot help it. He laughs.

 

 

The snows melt, all at once, and the earth becomes a waterfall.

Petyr takes her to the gates, as promised. The ferryman gives her something like a smile. She feels she might burst, like a time bomb ready to go off, and when the sunlight hits her face she has to keep herself from crying.

Catelyn is swathed in silks and flowers, a blur of blossoms, and she screams, river-blue eyes filling up. She lurches forward before Sansa can comprehend she’s doing the same, and they crash into each other, crying and laughing and she thinks she might die here, after all.

He’s there, behind her, a shadow that does not feel as cold under the sun. Catelyn would kill him, she knows, her mother’s hand already reaching for a dagger when they part. And suddenly, inexplicably, Sansa finds herself standing between them, a bridge and a wall made of glass.

They’re all bled clean of tears, now.

Sansa gathers her thoughts, knows she must say something, anything. Words of farewell to her kidnapper? How funny it would be. Before she can settle on something vague and crisp and precise, she realizes that he’s gone, swallowed in the shadows, the gates creaking shut with a horrible, decisive sharpness. Catelyn seems satisfied, bloodthirst only slightly quenched. Perhaps her mother will have her revenge, some day.

And Sansa… Sansa has to remind herself to not become furious, furious at him. Because he ought to have said _something_ , if only for the sake of appearances. But she’s in the light, diamante grass between her toes, and she thinks she can see the nymphs in the distance, waving, waiting for her. It’s bliss, or something close to it.

(The thing she will not tell her mother:

Last night she fell asleep in Petyr’s bed, and a thin trail of blood was sticking the sheets to her thigh, but she did not mind. There was something like triumph, something like determination, boiling under her bones.

He kissed her neck, and she pushed him away with a firm hand, told him, “Go to my garden, your gift to me. Bring me those seeds.”)

 

 

 

This is the truth, resonating. He did fashion a queen.

The only thought in his head is her absence, louder than the wails of lost souls. His gold is vast. The business booming. The underworld, his.

The underworld, empty.

She’ll be away for six months. Half a year. It’s nothing, it should feel like nothing, and he’ll be good at pretending she was never here, that she never tormented him with her doll eyes and her pale coltish calves and that hair, that fire-red hair.

The thing about Sansa: she was not quite what he expected her to be. She smelled like flowers and honey and vanilla beans, yes, and she could be polite and courteous as his Judges. She could be a porcelain doll, a carving out of ivory.

But she could also be stubborn, and whimsical, and bratty. Not the fragile girl she had learned to play, but an incorrigible one who questioned him and defied him and challenged him. Petyr liked that.

Sometimes, she would look at him with that concentrated face, like she was trying to pull him apart, peek inside his skull, pick at nerve-endings. He liked that, too.

She will be back, and Petyr has learnt that sharing the throne might be preferable, after all. And what if there’s something like a void inside him, now, he’s good at pretending.

She will be back.

**Author's Note:**

> [Hades and Persephone AU]
> 
> Whooo Petyr was not very nice in this one. Kidnapping is not meant to be romantic in any way, but I really wanted to try them with this myth.


End file.
